Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly.

This week's reading is shorter than most.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39

Week 40, Sept 30-Oct 6 – Chapter 24 and Chapter 25 of Volume III

Chapter 24 is called 'Externalisation of the Relations of Capital in the Form of Interest-Bearing Capital'

Chapter 25 is called 'Credit and Fictitious Capital'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

  • Kolibri [she/her]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I think Doubledee explained it well but I'll add my own thoughts to. If I understand your example right.

    Interest, therefore, becomes firmly established in a way that it no longer appears as a division of gross profit of indifference to production, which occurs occasionally when the industrial capitalist happens to operate with someone else's capital. His profit splits into interest and profit of enterprise even when he operates on his own capital. A merely quantitative division thus turns into a qualitative one. It occurs regardless of the fortuitous circumstance whether the industrial capitalist is, or is not, the owner of his capital. It is not only a matter of different quotas of profit assigned to different persons, but two different categories of profit which are differently related to the capital, hence related to different aspects of the capital.

    Vol 3 Chapter 23

    I cite that because as you said, 5% of that goes back to the lender and over time that will repay the original money capitalist. Or that portion for the money capitalist. It just a manner of proportions in regards to that surplus value or profit to who gets what of that total surplus value produced.

    The industrial capitalist preserve his 120 capital like he would if the money capitalist never came along. Since Marx mentions in a few others chapters, one of the goals of labor power is not to just produce surplus value, but also to recreate/preserve the already existing value. So that 120 capital is recreated back into the new commodities made along with surplus value. And that is still the same even when the money capitalist comes along. And when the money capitalist does come along, it just a matter of proportion for the profits or the total surplus value that was produced, they each get. Nothing to do with the preservation of the already existing capital value. And the constant capital does depreciate.

    To cite something way back from Vol 1, chapter 8

    [...]He is unable to add new labour, to create new value, without at the same time preserving old values, and this, because the labour he adds must be of a specific useful kind; and he cannot do work of a useful kind, without employing products as the means of production of a new product, and thereby transferring their value to the new product. The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the labourer nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist inasmuch as it preserves the existing value of his capital. [4] So long as trade is good, the capitalist is too much absorbed in money-grubbing to take notice of this gratuitous gift of labour. A violent interruption of the labour-process by a crisis, makes him sensitively aware of it